"Sizemore, Susan - Laws of the Blood 2 - Partners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sizemore Susan)

"Why am I here?" Haven complained as he reached the place where some weird, unwanted premonition had brought him. He tucked the shotgun under one arm and took a small flashlight out of his coat pocket. He began a slow sweep of the clearing with the light.

His intuition told him he was in the right place.

"I'm full of it," he muttered. He hoped.

He hoped he was wrong, that he was delusional. Not so much because he hated finding an innocent woman's body, even if he told himself he didn't care about the fate of innocent women. He just didn't like what it said about him if it turned out the dream was real. Or what it said about the situation. He was in town to find an FBI agent's missing kid, not to get involved with the usual supernatural crap.

As much as he hated being blackmailed into tracking down Danny Novak, he'd been thinking of the missing person job as a sort of vacation. He'd been way too intense in his hunt for vampires lately, and he knew it.

He was thinking too much. Analyzing. He'd even started reading books and making notes. Who needed that kind of bullshit?

If the woman was here, he thought as he quartered the ground with the thin beam of light, they had the usual sort of ball game on their hands. If she wasn't here, he was just crazy, and he could live with that.



Char kept very still in her spot on the far side of the clearing as the flashlight beam moved systematically across the ground. Light danced off the twining tendrils of fog, turning them briefly into silver ribbons, then moved on.

Either the man didn't remember where he'd dumped the body, she reasoned, or he wasn't the one who'd done the dumping. He muttered under his breath as he searched, obviously not afraid of being overheard. Interesting, she thought, and rubbed her jaw. If he wasn't the murderer, who was he? How'd he get here? Why?

Then the flashlight stopped by the spot where she'd been standing not long before, and a deep, gruff voice growled, "Shit."

He moved to stand over the corpse, shining the light directly down on the sprawled body. The light clearly showed what Char already knew: that the woman's heart was missing, as was much of her skull.

"What the fuck is this?" the rough-voiced man asked.

Good question. It finally occurred to Char that she was fully equipped to ask this intruder anything she wanted and make him answer. She was, after all, an Enforcer.

He, on the other hand, had a shotgun. And almost superhuman reflexes. He dropped the flashlight, brought up the double-barreled weapon, and fired it the instant she moved.

It was steel shot, she noted as the blast hit her. Then the pain drove out thought, and she got angry.

He fired a second time.

A snarling wolf charged out of the darkness from under the trees while the roar of the shotgun blasts still echoed in the clearing. Upright on two feet. Wearing a raincoat.

Haven was not prepared to confront a werewolf. He had no time to reload. He turned and ran for the Jeep.

Char reached for him, claws and fangs at full extension, as he spun away from her. She would have ripped his spinal cord out of his back, too, if she hadn't forgotten about the body and tripped over it. She landed hard on her knees in the wet undergrowth and caught herself on her hands as she pitched forward. She gave a frustrated howl and dug her claws deep into the soft earth.

Her forehead hit the ground and stayed there while the healing pain burned in her middle. It rolled over and through her and kept her down long enough for her to get her temper under control. At some point she heard the sound of a car engine in the distance. Her attacker getting away. A part of her wanted to get up and chase after him, to rip off the driver's-side door of his vehicle, pull him out onto the ground, let him take a good look into the face of death, and then have him for dinner.

But such behavior was exactly the sort of thing she most disapproved of in other strigoi, and she wouldn't let herself give in to the urge.

"Maybe he would be delicious," Char mumbled as she got to her feet. "But it wouldn't be a very nice."

He shot me! A nagging voice in the back of her head reminded her. But I frightened him first, she answered that voice. He probably thought she was the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. But he hurt her, and she still wanted to kill him. Char sighed.

She stood very still and looked up at clouds scudding across the moon for a while, turning herself back into human in physical as well as philosophical ways. When she was as normal as it was possible for one of her kind to be, she checked the damage. Her sweatshirt was bloody and torn, but her open raincoat hadn't suffered any damage. The numerous ragged wounds from the shotgun blast ached, but they were already raw and tender scars rather than open entry wounds. The internal damage was fixed as well, though she supposed she'd be spitting out steel shot for a few days.